33 posts tagged with "yama"

I am splitting the day again into yama and the other limbs. I realized that I was mixing things that was making it hard to separate actions for work with others with actions of the soul. Things that are related to the soul don’t require others. Things that are under yama are largely related to dealing with others.

The goal is to incorporate each of the Yogas into everything I do. Karma Yoga for the work, Bhakti Yoga for love of Bhagavan, Raja Yoga as the framework, and Jnana Yoga as core understanding. However, the day needs to be split into frameworks where we fully engage with the world. The purushathas are means to achieve those objectives. These let us fully enjoy the world without denying the world.

Furthermore I realize that I can simplify my yama into the purushartas. This means a focus on Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha. The work becomes simpler. Work belongs into each of these buckets.

So a combination of yoga and purushartas is required.

bramacharya is interesting as it mean’s celibacy. But celibacy is actually limited to the monks. A householder is not expected to uphold celibacy. Forcing this is a big failure of the spiritual path as it is repression. It is celibacy in terms of the extremes. So have a middle path for artha and kama.

yama contain the principles of behavior in the world while seeking the purushārtha of dharma, artha, kama, and moksha. As Hindus we are not limited to just going after Dharma and Moksha. We can and should strive after wealth and pleasure as well as those are part of life. We should just constrain them with the practices of yama.

For example, in terms of artha we should not perform violence when achieving wealth. We should be truthful while getting wealth. We should not steal while getting wealth. We should have self-control when accumulating wealth, the wealth should not control us. We should not covet wealth but do the actions that will lead to its growth. This above example can be used across all the purushārtha.

Artha and Kama are not to be avoided as they are a part of life. But they are to be sought after with the five yama principles.

What this means is that Artha and Kama need to be studied as much as Dharma and Moksha. If there are four aspects of life and we ignore three of them because we want to be monk like we will face difficulties in life as we are denying ourselves these other paths. And even monks aspire for artha and kama in their own way.

I’ve structured my personal and business into two distinct things. I have my business study and I have my personal study. This is a bit of a problem as I don’t have a framework I am optimizing my business around. I have the Yoga Sutras as a framework for life, but we live life within a society. Our work and our output into the greater civilization matters. As part of my study and practice I had largely ignored this larger framework.

I was chasing from different frameworks and figuring out different ones from Amazon, Toyota, Koch, Apple, etc. The problem is that it leads to a scattered approach to improving business processes. A business framework is just as important to find and stick with as a religious system of thought. While I do love various aspects of Christianity I don't usually apply them into my religious thought processes. This is because having multiple systems causes a lot of issues as the theological basis and models are completely different.

My scattered approach to business is because I don't have a standardized framework that I use. This leads to continuously changing track and not having a cohesive system to fall back upon. I do things that are fun and heroic, but may not be effective. I need a comprehensive business philosophy that I follow through on and base the foundation of my business around.

This foundation will be Lean and the foundational text will be the Toyota Way. The Toyota Production Method and the Lean system tie in well with the continuous improvement aspect of Yoga. The nature of these two being similar is quite important. It is based on long term thinking and process over heroics.

It is because of this I am going to standardize on The Toyota Way as the primary business guide. In most ways Lean has become a part of society and how things are developed. Build and reduce waste through processes. But the shorttermism of MBA programs are still a massive driver. The nice thing about our business is we are not driven by short term but can focus on 5-10 years in the future. This allows us to think in much longer timeframes. The way we survive for the long term is to focus on what we are good at and gradually eliminate all forms of waste.

However, I think Toyota has still one of the best processes in the world to gradually build out new consistent features. This seems to also be incorporated into Apple, Amazon and Koch as all three have taken huge lessons from the traditional lean method. Amazon seems to have forgotten it though. Further, So the Toyota Way seems to be a practical guide for implementing the type of company I admire in the first place. A company built on slow continuous improvement which ties in with what the Yoga Sutras say.

One can say that the Toyota Way is not timeless like the other texts I have. That is true, it isn’t but it does have a practical implementation based on modern technologies and operationalizing the current world. Not everything has to be timeless, technology changes and business adapts. Lean is built for the world that we currently inhabit. It may change as JIT may lose relevance once American power wanes, but for the time being it is the text that we have.

I am merging all my activities into a single repository so that it can be easy to manage. This is because there is a failure that I am experiencing and that is my attention is split between personal and public. This is proving to be a pain as I am not addressing the needs of the personal or work well. I am not delegating well and all of it is resulting in a failure.

This also means I am doing all the work instead of giving the appropriate team member the appropriate tasks. This is also proving problematic since I cannot integrate AI into the workflow to accelerate the development even further.

I need to actually delegate as much as possible the tasks that I have. So what will be wrong with this approach:

1. Everything is public. No privacy.
2. No hiding my personal and public. They are one and the same.

The good:

1. One daily checklist to go through versus several.
2. Delegate as many of those flywheels as possible.
3. A clearer setup of personal, OpsZero and the world.
4. Deeper integration into GitHub and AI.

My mistake with my process is that I am trying to get to new projects all the time. That is actually not the goal. The goal is to get through the routine as fast as possible. So the process shouldn't be to start new projects. The projects exist for the sake of fulfilling the routine. The routine is what matters the most.

So everyday the focus is to get through the routines as fast as possible. As part of the routine. This means a bit more simplicity in that since we are continuously optimizing each part of the routine. The goal is to make the checklists for the daily to be extremely strong.

What is currently transpiring is that I have three sets of trackers Github, Notes, and Google Docs. I keep looking at the Google Docs even though the place I need to keep track which is automated is Github. So I need to get back to Github as the primary source.

This means I will need to migrate to Github completely and off Google Docs. I know I just moved to it. But it is actually easier to manage the improvements as I go through the tasks rapidly in Github.

Another aspect is to go through the routine list before ever reading.

Another year another tax day. I realize that tax day may come once a year, but the stress is year round. The problem I face with taxes is that I consider it as something in the past or something to do in the future. The stress is there year round. This causes all sorts of problems as I never give the taxes their due until the last minute and well I don’t end up doing a good job and likely lose quite a bit in over or under payment. This is a bit annoying to deal with.

So I am forcing taxes to be in the present. They are a daily occurrence and will be handled as part of my daily routine. Like other things that I need to plan for in the future. I don’t do well with calendars, I don’t do well with them. If I bring it to the present and am always dealing with it, it leaves my mind.

Another aspect that I am going to be doing is just paying the estimates that are on the voucher instead of trying to calculate what I owe. This will simplify my taxes as I can just pay what I owe the following April. I was attempting to get an exact calculation trying to play the estimate game, but this is getting confusing.

To be frank the way the IRS does it is actually good because it means you can just focus on growth and not about what taxes you owe. If you just pay the last year’s and you make less you get a refund, if you do better than last year then you get an interest free loan until you have to pay taxes. This is actually a great incentive structure.

The 8 Limbs of Yoga are a pretty great system for giving an end to end system for all aspects of one’s life. I unfortunately divided my life into sevaka and sakha which was supposed to be inner life and outer life which is actually not fruitful. This divides my attention from outer life and inner life even though the point is it is all the same. The outer life informs the inner life.

• I am moving the Team, Capital and Ventures under yama. yama covers Karma Yoga so it makes sense to move the sakha portions under this limb.
• parabrahman is moving under ishvarapranidhana because my goal is to bridge the worship of the East with my life in the West. Further, devotion happens with others so it belongs under this section.
• Move Samaja under Capital. My aspiration with Samaja is to understand the Capital markets. So it is migrated under the Capital section.
• I am moving the biographies section in Yama into Niyama under Gurus. The biographies are actually mechanisms for creating Bhakti and thus fall under niyama.
• Migrate sakha to yama. sakha doesn’t exist independently and is moved to yama.
• Move the sakha blogposts to yama. All the sakha blog posts are now yama blog posts.
• Got rid of the sevaka and sakha altogether. Flattening the structure. Flatting sevaka and move the writing into index
• Update daily to be flattened.
• Moved Bhakti Sutras to be under niyama.
• Move Hinduism study section under niyama to isvarapranidana
• Move guru section under study
• Merge classics in ventures under yama
• Split itihasa and Puranas into Yama and niyama

I have started to hate the unfettered capitalism that has lead to the private equity industry which has taken over a large portion of America. It loads up each company with debt and destroys the value of the individual business. However I do find the structure of private equity to be useful. It is an effective strategy because it separates the concerns of the capital from the concerns of the venture. While the venture needs to grow to sustain itself, it is not concerned per se with finances. It is a product that is grown independently.

In that regard I have divided the sakha into three specific components:

• Capital. Will focus on financials and taxes.
• Team. Focused on hiring and training. Standardizing experiences of the team that we hire.
• Ventures. Building specific businesses with a focus on free cash flow.

This structure allows me to have the sakha focused completely on the world. The sevaka piece can then focus on the inner world. The goal is to split the focus such that everything I do is pushed out into the the buckets of the inner world and outer world.

One of the big problems I had was that I was incorporating a lot of the outer world into the sevaka path. While yama can be considered Karma Yoga, it should be more to learn how to be a Karma Yogi not necessarily the tactical aspects. The part should be completely moved to the sakha path.

The inner world includes a lot of things including meditation, gardening, cleaning, exercise, and study. All of these are important and can all be done during the sevaka time. Overall this simplifies a lot of my goals.

I am moving back to Github Actions hosted by Microsoft and away from self-hosting. The gist of the way things lie at the moment are that we will be having higher energy prices which will translate to higher compute costs and things that are JIT will be a bit more cost effective at the moment.

This means removing unnecessary compute actions and such.

opsZero is reaching a decade in age. While I have grown it I have made a lot of mistakes which I want to address systematically. Second, opsZero is going to be standardized allowing us to grow in a consistent manner and as a single brand. Lastly, with the geopolitical situation access to compute is going to become more important and we will be returning to a world moving away from the Cloud and focused on cost and efficiency.

While we will have to address the situation of opsZero, the Iran War has created a new World Order in which the East dominates and power will wholesale move out of the West. One of the pillars of this new world will be India. As the value of the dollar shrinks the only outcome for a lot of Western companies is to move their bases to India.

Failures​

opsZero's focus has been scattered in terms of technology and business. We have moved the business into areas that are just not our core competency. Here are a list of our failures:

• Partnerships. We have focused too much on partnerships and they haven’t yielded much. Most of the partners we have worked with have gone bankrupt or have been dismantled. I met some interesting people but overall not useful in terms of revenue generation. I would even state that the AWS Partnership is a failure. These companies have gone full blown into AI putting an immense amount of CapEx with the expectation that it will replace humans. Ironically, this is destroying the human relationships that power these businesses in the first place.
• Ventures. Multiple brands, multiple APIs, different services, etc. while fun are a waste of time. It is diffusing the energy of the company on too many things and makes it difficult to communicate to the team what we are working on. It makes more sense to have a single brand of opsZero and add additional levers to that brand.
• Sales. Because of the different brands it has become hard to sell as each brand requires a different set of expertise. The gist of it is that we are a DevOps Agency with a focus on Cloud + AI. That is the core of the company and it is on top of that we add additional capabilities. However, my sales has been honestly not this. It has been going all over the place. There is no core focus that everything else is built around.
• Resale. We decided to do reselling which is a painful business that is not worth the time. It is low margin, the APIs are annoying, the taxes confusing and so on. The time and energy I focused on it the last two years were largely pointless. I should have focused on other things like growing revenue without the need of an AWS. Reselling isn’t glamorous and is monotonous.

Standardization​

Because of the failures listed above we will be changing the business. For the next stage of our growth we are going to focus on a few things and deemphasize many others.

1. One Brand. Everything will be under the opsZero brand. No ifs and buts. I will no longer be dealing with multiple brands. It is just a pain to deal with and we already have the opsZero brand being strong anyways so it doesn't make sense to manage multiple brands.
2. Product First. We will incrementally release new product under opsZero. Since we are limiting the focus to just opsZero.com it will make it easier to develop.
3. Aggressive Direct Sales. We will build our own sales team that will be aggressive in nature looking to grow the company.
4. Limited Resell. We will only do resell if it makes sense, it is not the core part of our business. We will only do resale for companies we provide DevOps services.
5. Limited Partnerships. We are going to do direct sales and focus our energies on that. We will only do partnerships if there is value. Going direct to customer is better than having an in between. What this means is growing the company internally. To focus on increasing the size of the company.

Verticals​

opsZero has been chasing every niche and this hasn't been fruitful. This has us chasing enterprises, SMBs, startups, etc., etc. This has proven to be ineffective. Each industry has a different tempo, requirements and style. Each is different from the other and we haven't created a tempo of outreach. Chasing after healthcare companies is difficult versus chasing after enterprise, etc.

So we will focus on just three verticals that are under served and where we can drive a lot of value:

1. Startups. I do believe that the startup ecosystem will move to India and the USA market will dry up as capital costs increase due to the Iran War. So new startups will largely die off, but for the time being this is still a primary area we need to go after.
2. SMB. There are a lot of SMBs in second tier cities that don't have expertise that need DevOps. We can gain significant leverage in these areas.
3. Healthcare. Focus on healthcare and the needs of healthcare customers.
4. SLED. City and local governments will need support as their taxes crash when the US economy tanks. They will need to be more efficient. SLED is complex but it will allow us to become sticky overtime.

Solutions​

We are diversifying from the Cloud to be more Hybrid Cloud. Especially, with the Iranian attacks on the AWS UAE data centers the age of centralization is over. As the American Empire crumbles the centralization of power into American companies like AWS also starts to reduce. So decentralization becomes the norm again.

• DevOps. The basis of our go to market. We do all DevOps with OpenTofu/Terraform as the basis.
• Kubernetes. Kubernetes is our bread and butter. We will focus on making this the core of our value. Moving Windows, Linux, etc. workloads to Kubernetes is a primary goal.
• Identity. Setup and manage identity solutions.
• Compliance. Focusing on HIPAA, SOC2, PCI-DSS, etc.
• Datasets. Build and host core datasets for companies that want to use these for their own specific use cases.
• DBA. Database and performance tuning to lower the cost of compute for companies.
• AI. Low cost AI compute solutions such as running workloads on Macs, etc.
• FinOps. Resale business, but we will likely limit to just the Cloud.

One of the goals with the products side is to focus on build out using open source.

New World Order​

With the Iran War we will see a rather fast destruction of the American Empire. Wealth and power will move to the East specifically India and China. Incidentally, I also think this means multinationals will move East as well. With a drop in the dollar and a lack of growth opportunities in the US a period of stagflation will take over the country and a debt crisis will essentially cut the dollar's value by 50%. Low growth and high inflation means hiring people in the US becomes an economic burden resulting in wholesale migration of jobs East.

Multinationals are not inherently tied to a location. They move as needed to different jurisdictions based on their focus on profitability. This is nothing new and has been a constant throughout history. This disadvantages SMBs and startups that don’t have these relationships or ability to build businesses in India. Migration of these roles to India is the area that we will target.

However, as multinationals and other companies didn’t die when the British Empire collapsed there is a way to get through to the other side of the American Collapse. We need to understand that we are moving to a:

• Low Energy. As Middle East War rages the amount of energy drops by 25% for the foreseeable future. Low energy will also affect other things such as chips and food. Overall, energy becomes exceedingly expensive.
• Resource Poor. With energy going up the amount of resources such as capital that is available to people and businesses will reduce. This means there will likely be less capital intensive businesses that will become the norm.

To address this situation we must force ourselves towards two specific goals.

• Low cost. We will focus on being the low cost provider. Our goal is to drive costs further down.
• Standardization. Standardize all parts of the business and continuously reduce costs for ourselves and our customers.

Hindurastra​

Lastly, the goal of our business is to strengthen and turn India into a Hindurastra. As the American Empire dies, Sanatana Dharma will be a dominant force in the world. India will have a difficult time for the next few years, but once the 30s come along there will be a rapid acceleration of energy and focus with India becoming one of the major forces alongside China.

When this happens Indians will notice that Hindu Dharma is the driving force of the world. With Buddhism in China or Yoga in America. This will lead to a recognition of India's spiritual contribution to the world and a return to our roots. The timeframe around the 2040s is when India will become a spiritual power again.

So our goal until then is to grow internally using Sanatana Dharma as our core.